Scottish People

The Scots: Whether in a Crowd in Edinburgh or a Lone
Shepherdess in the Far North West

"Scottish People" is a slightly awkward title, but in the end it
was the only option that couldn't mean something else. "Scots" would have done,
but that can mean the Scots language. On the other hand, "Scotch", when applied
to people, is a word long out of use: you get "Scotch Whisky" or "Scotch Pies" or "Scotch
Eggs", but in the modern world using "Scotch" to mean "Scottish People" has a
perjorative edge, and should be avoided. Having got the definitions straight,
we'll use "Scots" on the rest of this page.

Who are the Scots? A number of different groups are usually seen as
qualifying: anyone born in Scotland who
still considers themselves to be a Scot; anyone living in Scotland who
identifies more closely with Scotland than with anywhere else they might have
lived or were born; and anyone living anywhere else in the world who is
descended from Scots and who considers themselves to be a Scot.

At the time of the 2011 Census there were some 5.3 million
people living in Scotland, of whom about 90% considered themselves to be Scots.
Additionally there are some 800,000 people who regard themselves as Scots
living in England, Wales or Northern Ireland.

Scotland's often turbulent history and its long record of large scale
emigration means there are far more people who consider themselves Scots
outwith Scotland than within it. In the 2000 Census, 4.8 million US residents
considered themselves Scots by ancestry. And another 4.3 million US residents
considered themselves to be Scots-Irish, i.e. descended from Scots who settled
in Ulster, perhaps for generations, before emigrating to the United States.
This makes a total of around 9 million Scots in the United States: and some
estimates suggest that a further 38 million US Citizens could consider
themselves to be Scots or Scots-Irish, but don't (and so don't count as Scots
under the definition set out above).

Meanwhile, 4.1 million Canadians reported Scottish ancestors in the
2001 Census. Scottish communities exist in France, Italy, Holland and Poland,
and it has been estimated that up to 250,000 Russians are of Scottish descent.
Further afield, 20% of the European settlers in New Zealand were from Scotland,
as were many who went to Australia. And there are significant numbers of people
descended from Scottish settlers living in Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Argentina.
Overall there are probably around five times as many Scots living outside
Scotland than within it.

Historically, the people who ended up living in Scotland were a
pretty mixed bunch. If you take a snapshot in about AD 700, a fairly large part
of the country was occupied by the Picts, while what is today
Argyll was occupied by the
Scots of Dalriada, probably
immigrants from Ireland. Meanwhile the Angles of Northumbria, previously of
Germanic origin, regularly made their presence felt in south east Scotland, and
the south west of the country was in the possession of the Britons of the
Kingdom of Strathclyde.

And if this were not a rich enough mix, the Vikings increasingly
had a presence in north and west Scotland from about 800, first as raiders,
then as settlers, then as an assimilated part of the native population. The
final great wave came with the arrival of Norman-English who took influential
roles in society from the 1100s onwards. In more recent centuries, settlers
from a wide variety of backgrounds have settled in Scotland and become Scots.
These include people from Ireland, France, England, Italy, Poland, India,
Pakistan and many other places.

Linguistically, the Picts who drove the Romans from Hadrian's wall
seemingly spoke a distinct Pictish language, possibly distantly related to
Welsh. The Scots who settled in the west, and eventually came to dominate the
Picts, spoke a form of Gaelic. The Angles of the
south east spoke Northumbrian Old English which later became the Middle English
known as Early Scots. The Britons of Strathclyde spoke Cumbric, also related to
Welsh; while people in the Viking dominated areas spoke Norn, or Old Norse.

Over the 500 years until 1500, the Norse influence was largely
displaced by the Gaelic-speaking Scots. Meanwhile,
The Early Scots language slowly expanded its influence to become the most
common language spoken in the Borders, the Central Lowlands, the coastal fringe
of Aberdeenshire,
Caithness and the Northern Isles. Everywhere else, including a large part of
Dumfries and
Galloway and South
Ayrshire, spoke Scottish Gaelic. Over the 500 years since 1500, Scots has
remained a commonly spoken language, but largely displaced by Scottish English,
much more closely related to English, for the written word and by many in
speech as well. Increasing use of Scots and Scottish English across Scotland
forced Scottish Gaelic to steadily retreat west:
sometimes as a result of deliberate Government policy, to the point that fewer
and fewer people could speak it. In recent increasing efforts have been made to
halt the decline in Gaelic, though in 2011 the figure
for those who could speak it stood at 1.1% of the population, the lowest ever
recorded, and down from 1.2% ten years earlier.

The last Gaelic-only speakers in Scotland
were recorded in 1971, which means that as a visitor if you can speak English
you'll have no problem being understood. But because Scots (the language)
remains in spoken use by many Scots (the people), visitors can find that
understanding what is said to them can be less straightforward than being
understood: it can take a little time to "tune in" to what really does amount
to a different, though related, language. An additional complication is that
there are at least four different dialects of Scots in use in different parts
of Scotland. One of them, "North East Scots" is sufficiently distinct for it to
carry a separate name, "Doric".

The divide between Scots-speaking and Gaelic-speaking areas for a time also coincided with a
much deeper divide, between the Highlands and the Lowlands. Traditionally,
Lowland Scotland, especially after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, measured
itself against the relative economic success of the English. At the same time
it tended to upon Highlanders as, at best, second class citizens. The Jacobite
uprisings of 1689 to 1746 made this tendency much worse. It was not until the
early 1800s that symbols of the Highlands like
tartan, kilts and bagpipes, some actually made illegal
after 1746, were suddenly embraced by Lowland Scots as "Scottish". The concept
of Highlands and Lowlands as being fundamentally different in culture and
outlook has since ceased to be relevant: though be warned that if you hear a
Scot living in the Central Belt talking about "The North" he or she could mean
anywhere beyond Stirling.

And, finally, are Scots anti-English? The collective answer is a
simple, straightforward, "no". Some individual Scots may be, but far more Scots
are anti-Celtic or anti-Rangers than are anti-English. It is worth remembering
that England and Scotland are siblings who spent 1,000 years of adolescence
unable to get to get out of each other's company and fighting one another,
literally, politically, economically and culturally. Many Scots have still to
get over an instinctive tendency to support England's opponents in any
international sporting fixture, but that's about as far as it goes. And the
years since devolution have seen a corner turned, with a growing degree of
confidence and maturity emerging across Scotland which means that for the first
time in over a thousand years we tend not to feel ourselves to be anyone's poor
neighbour. This was reflected in the closeness of the the result of the
independence Referendum held in Scotland in September 2014.